As I wrote last week, the Obama administration seems to have erred in being slow off the mark in terms of filling Federal Reserve Board of Governors vacancies out of an honest mistake—it just hadn’t been the case for thirty or so years that Fed Board nominations were a big deal. But today we can see that it is a big deal, and as Paul Krugman notes the departing Kevin Warsh was one of the bad guys on the Board.
But the administration’s mistake in this regard is just part of a larger progressive community failure. For example, with Warsh out where the talk about people who’d be good replacements? Ideally, I’d be looking for someone with:
— Real specialization in monetary economics capable of swaying the non-specialists on the FOMC.
— A commitment to monetary stimulus, none of this “structural” hand-waving.
— A skeptical view of the merits of a large and profitable financial services sector.
— A generally progressive & egalitarian outlook.
I don’t really know what the list is. I hope some of our economist-bloggers out there will have some suggestions.
Lux Alptraum and others have written better critiques than I could of Rihanna’s appropriation of S&M for her video for the song of the same name. I will say, though, that I actually found the video reasonably effective as commentary on the relationship between the Hollywood gossip press and the stars they cover:
Putting ball gags in reporters’ mouths isn’t a terribly subtle choice, but it’s also clear from the reporters continued scribbling in their notebooks that they aren’t silenced at all, just participating in the game they’re both playing. And I dug the odd riffs on the old-school newsroom towards the end, the desks of All the Presidents Men gone 80s-sherbert-colored and covered in latex. I think it’s telling that during the bridge, where she’s singing about the pleasure of her interactions, her body is covered in newsprint and she’s vamping like an old-school Playboy bunny.
Obviously there are situations where the paparazzi get wildly out of control, and I find stars’ courting of tabloids personally weird if professionally explicable. But there are negotiations and compromises and an outwardly inexplicable relationship at stake. It may not be incredibly respectful of S&M practices to employ them this way, but I think the video perhaps shows more respect for those practices than a simple aestheticization and coopting of them.
I suppose this doesn’t help his reputation, but I find Justice Thomas’ habit of not actually participating in Supreme Court arguments to be kind of charming:
A week from Tuesday, when the Supreme Court returns from its midwinter break and hears arguments in two criminal cases, it will have been five years since Justice Clarence Thomas has spoken during a court argument.
I feel like the really talking justices like Scalia and Roberts are just sort of showing off. The reality is that while being a Supreme Court Justice is unquestionably a very important job, I don’t see much reason to think it’s a particularly difficult one and all Thomas is showing is that a person can quietly go about the business of deciding which outcome he likes without raising a fuss over it. I’m really not looking forward to the spectacle of eight justices yammering away at a hearing over the Affordable Care Act pretending to be open-minded and ready to be persuaded by the quality of their students oral presentations. Thomas, sitting in his chair having more-or-less decided in advance what he thinks about major legal issues, seems like a more honest guy.
I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about climate change liars. Those people who make a living deliberately deceiving the public about the scientific consensus on climate disruption. These people are awful, they know who they are. They have to live with their lies.
But what’s worse is the other lie I’ve discovered in the process. It’s the lie that I’m telling. It’s the lie that we all tell to our children and each other when we don’t talk about climate disruption. It’s the lie of us all pretending that everything will be OK.
People have lots of opinions about what it takes to be a great parent. But I’m pretty sure that this isn’t on anyone’s list: Lying to your children about the unraveling of nature and the catastrophes that will certainly follow.
That’s Richard Wiles, co-founder of the Environmental Working Group, on HuffPost. Prior to EWG, Wiles was a senior staff officer at the National Academy of Sciences’ Board on Agriculture.
I suggested on Saturday that tax-induced migration of rich people “is real, but limited, and the further you get from New Jersey the less real it becomes.” Via a strangely irate Robert Waldmann I learn that there’s a new attempt to empirically estimate this effect from Cristobal Young and Charles Varner in the National Tax Journal. Their conclusion in “Millionaire Migration and State Taxation of Top Incomes: Evidence From a Natural Experiment” is that when New Jersey imposed a millionaire tax under Jon Corzine this prompted little additional out-migration except among retirees and people who primarily earn their income from investments.
Three weeks ago, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) — the second-highest ranking Republican in the House of Representatives — repeatedly refused to call theories that President Obama was not born in America “crazy.” He told Meet the Press’s David Gregory that “I don’t think it’s nice to call anyone crazy,” and refused to rebuke the wild conspiracy theories.
Today on the same program, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) also refused to repudiate such theories under a similar line of questioning from Gregory, who showed Boehner a Fox News clip in which several Iowa Republicans in a focus group said they believed Obama was a Muslim. Though Boehner was immediately willing to say he “believes” Obama is an American-born Christian, and that he takes the president “at his word,” Boehner would not repudiate those who think otherwise. Three separate times, Boehner told Gregory that “it’s not my job to tell the American people what to think”:
GREGORY: Do you not think it’s your responsibility to stand up to that kind of ignorance?
BOEHNER: David, it’s not my job to tell the American people what to think. Our job in Washington is to listen to the American people. Having said that, the state of Hawaii has said that he was born there. That’s good enough for me. The president says he’s a Christian. I accept him at his word.
GREGORY: But isn’t that a little bit fast and loose? I mean, you are the leader in Congress and you are not standing up to obvious facts and saying these are facts, and if you don’t believe that it’s nonsense?
BOEHNER: I just outlined the facts as I understand them. I believe that the president is a citizen. I believe the president is a Christian, I’ll take him at his word.
GREGORY: But that kind of ignorance over whether he’s a Muslim doesn’t concern you?
BOEHNER: Listen, the American people have the right to think what they want to think. I can’t — it’s not my job to tell them.
Watch it:
Gregory directly accused Boehner of hedging because “it weakens the president politically, it seeks to de-legitimize him,” to which Boehner reacted with visible indignation. But it’s hard to imagine Gregory isn’t correct. Boehner and his fellow Republicans — like all politicians — always try to persuade Americans, and “tell them what to think” on a wide range of issues. Just minutes earlier, Boehner was warning against a deficit crisis he said is caused by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and told Gregory: “I think it’s incumbent on the leaders in Washington, those of us to go out and help the American people understand how big the problem is.”
Gregory pointed out that Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID) made a birth certificate crack at CPAC this week, and Boehner brushed it off as a joke. Gregory might have mentioned that birther theories are not a joke to many members of Boehner’s caucus: a tally kept at World Net Daily claims that the following members of Cantor’s caucus doubt the president’s citizenship: Reps. Bill Posey (R-FL), Dan Burton (R-IN), Ted Poe (R-TX), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), John Campbell (R-CA), John R. Carter (R-TX), John Culberson (R-TX), Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), Randy Neugebauer (R-TX), Trent Franks (R-AZ), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), and Kenny Marchant (R-TX). Still, Boehner and Cantor stubbornly refuse to repudiate fellow Republicans that believe a provably false theory.
Steve Benen: “Looking over the guest lists for all of the Sunday shows, viewers will see two Republican senators (McCain, Graham), three Republican House members (Boehner, Ryan, Schilling), three likely Republican presidential candidates (Barbour, Gingrich, Pawlenty) … and zero Democrats from Congress or the Obama administration.”
This right-wing tilt of Sunday shows is nothing new, but it also seems to me to be part of a trend of the media being confused about which party has a majority in the Senate. If you think back to the dark ages of 2009 and 2010 you’ll recall that the press generally took a skeptical view of liberal legislation passed by the House that stood no chance of securing 60 votes in the Senate. Such legislation would often be ignored as irrelevant, and coverage of it when it existed would focus on things like getting senators to point out that it was DOA or pestering House leaders about how they expected to get these ideas passed the Senate. And that was when Democrats actually had a majority in both Houses. But since the New Year, I keep hearing about the House GOP being lined up for confrontation with Barack Obama. But what about Harry Reid? Where are the questions for Paul Ryan, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, etc. about getting 60 votes for things? That means all the rock-ribbed conservative senators, plus Scott Brown and Olympia Snow and Susan Collins and Mark Kirk, then a dozen Democrats of one sort or another. That’s a high bar to pass.
Not that this is the source of the long-term budget deficit or anything, but as long as we’re looking at small-bore spending cuts, before we take away poor people’s subsidized heating oil maybe it would be smart to take a look at the sorry state of our physical money. According to the inflation calculator, a penny in 1970 would be worth five cents in 2009 dollars. I wasn’t alive in 1970, but many of this site’s readers were. Were people walking around forty years ago saying “damn, these pennies have too much purchasing power, we really need a coin worth one-fifth that much?” I doubt that they were. So let’s stop wasting money minting pennies.
Similarly, the 1970 quarter is worth even more than today’s paper dollar bill. If we stop printing paper dollars, people will get used to using dollar coins which are much more durable and won’t need frequent replacement. Again, money saved. And in both cases, nobody in need would suffer at all. You can’t balance the budget with this kind of small change (ha ha ha) but it really doesn’t make sense to waste money, and as long as we’re having a misguided conversation about short-term spending cuts some genuine waste deserves to be on the table.
By Andrea Nill Sanchez on Feb 13, 2011 at 12:25 pm
For past several years, Republicans have repeatedly argued that they will not support comprehensive immigration reform until the border is secured. In 2006, current Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) stated that putting millions of undocumented immigrants on a path to legalization without meeting certain border security benchmarks would place “the cart before the horse.” “We spent a lot of time, effort and money getting more security on the border. But we’re nowhere close to having the kind of secure borders that Americans want,” said Boehner.
So, it comes as a surprise that Republicans are rallying behind a bundle of sharp spending cuts that include slashing $600 million from border security and immigration enforcement funds. Today, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), chairman of the House Budget Committee, told Fox News’ Chris Wallace that he’s willing to defend each and every one of the spending cuts Republicans are proposing:
WALLACE: Let’s get specific, because the Democrats say, “look, it’s very easy to talk about a big number, it’s very easy to talk about a specific percentage.” But let’s get into some specific programs of what what Republicans are going to be offering this week.
Let’s look at the cuts: $3 billion for the Environmental Protection Agency; $2 billion for job training, $600 million for border security and immigration enforcement; and $1.6 billion for the National Institutes of Health; $500 million for the COPS program which puts more police on the streets.
Congressmen, when it gets down to those specifics, are you willing to defend all those cuts?
RYAN: Yes, because last year, these agencies got double and triple digit spending increases. [...] We cannot continue down this path of having double and triple digit spending increases on government agencies. No matter how popular sounding these programs are, they mortgage our children’s future and they compromise our economic growth today.
Watch it:
Spending on immigration enforcement has soared since 2002 from $7.5 billion to over $17 billion in fiscal year 2010. Yet Republicans have continued to demand more resources be directed at the border and enforcing immigration laws as a prerequisite to giving comprehensive reform the slightest consideration.
It’s true that throwing more money at the border without fixing the nation’s broken immigration system is a waste of limited resources and money. The border is already supposedly “safer than its ever been” and it won’t get much safer without providing economic migrants with the legal channels to enter the U.S. so border patrol can focus more on actual threats to public safety. If Republicans weren’t so intent on rejecting these well-supported facts as part of a broader effort to block comprehensive immigration reform, they might have an easier time justifying at least one of their proposed spending cuts.
By Andrea Nill Sanchez on Feb 13, 2011 at 12:25 pm
For past several years, Republicans have repeatedly argued that they will not support comprehensive immigration reform until the border is secured. In 2006, current Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) stated that putting millions of undocumented immigrants on a path to legalization without meeting certain border security benchmarks would place “the cart before the horse.” “We spent a lot of time, effort and money getting more security on the border. But we’re nowhere close to having the kind of secure borders that Americans want,” said Boehner.
So, it comes as a surprise that Republicans are rallying behind a bundle of sharp spending cuts that include slashing $600 million from border security and immigration enforcement funds. Today, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), chairman of the House Budget Committee, told Fox News’ Chris Wallace that he’s willing to defend each and every one of the spending cuts Republicans are proposing:
WALLACE: Let’s get specific, because the Democrats say, “look, it’s very easy to talk about a big number, it’s very easy to talk about a specific percentage.” But let’s get into some specific programs of what what Republicans are going to be offering this week.
Let’s look at the cuts: $3 billion for the Environmental Protection Agency; $2 billion for job training, $600 million for border security and immigration enforcement; and $1.6 billion for the National Institutes of Health; $500 million for the COPS program which puts more police on the streets.
Congressmen, when it gets down to those specifics, are you willing to defend all those cuts?
RYAN: Yes, because last year, these agencies got double and triple digit spending increases. [...] We cannot continue down this path of having double and triple digit spending increases on government agencies. No matter how popular sounding these programs are, they mortgage our children’s future and they compromise our economic growth today.
Watch it:
Spending on immigration enforcement has soared since 2002 from $7.5 billion to over $17 billion in fiscal year 2010. Yet Republicans have continued to demand more resources be directed at the border and enforcing immigration laws as a prerequisite to giving comprehensive reform the slightest consideration.
It’s true that throwing more money at the border without fixing the nation’s broken immigration system is a waste of limited resources and money. The border is already supposedly “safer than its ever been” and it won’t get much safer without providing economic migrants with the legal channels to enter the U.S. so border patrol can focus more on actual threats to public safety. If Republicans weren’t so intent on rejecting these well-supported facts as part of a broader effort to block comprehensive immigration reform, they might have an easier time justifying at least one of their proposed spending cuts.
